quarta-feira, 3 de fevereiro de 2016

Example structures generated by the book's French grammar

Along the 8 chapters of the book, the implementation of a computational grammar of French in the LFG/XLE formalism is explained step by step. Here are some example f-structures and c-structures generated by the XLE parser from the book's final grammar fragment.

Abstract

Lexical-Functional
Grammar (LFG) is a well-established formalism for writing grammars of any
natural language. Being explicit, LFG grammars can be implemented on the
computer, which makes it possible to impartially test grammatical analyses
against large amounts of data.

To profit from the LFG formalism's amenableness to empirical testing, this Introduction combines grammatical analysis with its
implementation. It introduces the LFG model step by step, simultane­ously
developing increasingly complex computational grammar fragments of French.
These frag­ments are implemented in the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE), the
state-of-the-art grammar development tool for the LFG formalism. The book also
shows how word tokenization and in­flectional morphology may be implemented in
terms of Finite State Morphology using the Xerox Finite State Tools (XFST) and
how they may be integrated into the XLE French grammar fragment. No previous
knowledge of XLE or XFST is assumed; formal devices and techniques are
gradually explained in the course of the book's 8 chapters. All XLE and XFST
grammar code, test sets, scripts, etc. from the book will soon be freely
available for download on Github at https://github.com/lfg-french-grammar/book.

The book addresses crucial topics of French syntax, such as agreement,
the subject clitic, the adjective, prepositions, determiners, sentential
complements, infinitives and control verbs, the pas­sive, auxiliary selection
in compound tenses, as well as a fragment of verb inflection, including stem
variations induced by the orthography. Apart from its use as an introductory
textbook or self-study manual for LFG or for French syntax from a
lexical-functional perspective, the book can be used as well as an introduction
to grammar development with XLE and Finite-State Morphology with XFST.

Intended users are
students of computer science, natural language processing, and compu­tational
linguistics on the one hand, and of theoretical linguistics or Romance
linguistics on the other. The text is in German, but all LFG, XLE and XFST
rules and representations are conform to the English-based, international
usage.